Page 28 of The Team

Jay grabbing the back of Rhett’s shirt was the only thing that stopped him.

“What can you tell us?” Jay asked as they got to the door. “About the pathogen.”

“Nothing,” guy number one said as he opened the door.

“Director King will be in touch directly,” guy number two said before walking out, the door latching closed behind them.

Rhett’s hands were fists. “Motherfuckers,” he seethed at the door, still too mad to say much else. “They treated me like I’m the only one of us who fucking matters and that just fucks me off so bad.”

“No,” Jay said. “You’re the only one who touched the articles, and that tells us something about what they’re dealing with. It’s direct contact only; skin contact only, maybe ingested. Not airborne. They know that much already. Because, like he said, if it were airborne, we’d all be dead.”

Rhett turned to look at him and his anger flared again, though not at Jay, but inward. At himself.

“I shouldn’t have gone,” he said quietly. “I put us all at risk.”

“You disobeyed a direct order,” Echo added. Then he cracked a smile. “You’ll be off King’s Christmas card list now, for sure.”

“No,” Azrael said with the hint of a smile. “He’ll be off his favourite list because of the ‘fucking heads on plaques on his living room wall’ comment.”

“You all heard that?” Rhett asked.

“Pretty hard not to,” Coyote said with a shrug. “And look, Captain, I’ll tell ya something straight. Is disobeying a direct order ever a good idea? Probably not. But I’da done the same thing. We’ve got two members of this team missing, abducted, kidnapped, held hostage, we don’t fuckin’ know. Because they ain’t telling us shit. If they hadda kept you in the know, you wouldn’ta had to break protocol. So fuck ’em. I’m standing with you. Because I’m telling ya, if I ever get abducted or go missing and they withhold information, you bet your ass I’d want you to break every rule to find me.”

“Same,” Azrael said. “Till the end, right?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Sid added.

“Right,” Echo agreed with a nod.

Chen looked somewhat confused, but he shrugged. “I not know what we agree to.” He looked to Yin for some kind of clarification.

Jay said something in Mandarin, and that made Yin smile. “Rule-breaking is team-building, huh?”

“Something like that,” Jay said.

“Never broke a rule back home?” Coyote asked Yin.

Yin snorted as if that was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “Absolutely not. If I told my superiorofficer that I’d put his head on my living room wall, death would be a mercy.”

“Well,” Sid said, going back to the window. “There’s a bakery two blocks up, and I volunteer Captain Rule Breaker and his not-contaminated wallet to go get us breakfast.”

“That’s fair,” Rhett said.

Then, of course, his phone buzzed. He knew it was Director King without even looking.

Fuuuuuck.

He answered the call and put it on speaker. “You’re on speaker,” Rhett said. “There’s no privacy in this room, and it’s best if they hear the science-speak for themselves.”

Director King made an unhappy sound. “Ouston, when you get back, I think you and I are going to have a little chat.”

“When I get back, I will have Kowalski and Myles with me, and you can rip me a new asshole all you like.”

Sid grinned, Jay sighed quietly, and Yin shook his head in disbelief.

“With a bit of luck,” Rhett added, “I will have slept and eaten something by then, unlike the last twenty-four hours, so I’ll probably be more amicable. Now, tell us about the contamination, the pathogen, or whatever it is. And tell us what the hell my two team members have to do with it.”

King sighed. “Agents Kowalski and Myles were in Armenia scoping intel on a man named Aram Gordian. It was supposed to be a simple op, as you know. But then Gordian met with a man by the name of Sadiq Askerov. Askerov is a biochem engineer with BioMed Laboratory in Baku that has, up until now, specialised in fungal toxins.Now, as you know, Gordian has been on our watchlist for some time. A person of interest, someone who appeared on our radar a year ago after the whole Istomin case got blown open. We’d never heard of him before that, and he went underground when the ZBK faction was ended last year.”

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